Part III
The judiciary during the Repression

Nunca Más (Never Again) - Report of Conadep  - 1984
 

Deposition relating to the disappearance of Dr. Darlo Francisco Molina - File N° 6171

Dr Molina was Deputy Governor of the province of Tucumán and President of the Tucumán Senate.

On 7 December 1976, Decree No. 3197 ordered Dr Molina to be held at the disposition of the National Executive but, according to note No. 443/78 from the Ministry of the Interior, he was never arrested.

His wife states, however, that on 17 December 1976, seven days after the detention order was signed, he was kidnapped by security forces from his office and taken away in his own car.

The same day, writs of habeas corpus were presented to Provincial and Federal Courts. Both were rejected on the grounds that no records showed him as being detained. Furthermore, on 24 December 1977, with no explanation given for the change, Decree No. 3723 revoked the order for his detention,

All administrative and judicial proceedings to establish the whereabouts of Dr. Dardo Francisco Molina have to date proved unsuccessful.

In view of this, the reasons behind the de facto government's Decree No. 2726 of 22 October 1983 ordering the destruction of all files relating to arrests made under the state of siege, are open to interpretation. This hasty incineration of information which could have clarified the circumstances of many of the disappearances, was intended exclusively to prevent the relevant investigations.

However, the destruction ordered by the said decree did include (fortuitously) files under the heading of 'movement of prisoners' (transfers, etc.), so we can draw attention to an item of considerable interest: in a significant number of cases, the dates of the decrees for detention at the disposition of the National Executive were subsequent to the actual time of arrest. This means that the actual deprivation of liberty was prior, sometimes by quite a considerable time, to the date of the relevant decree. This constitutes the first blatant abuse of the military government's own legality. This Commission has found 175 cases of people who were in this situation.